High-Performing Individuals on a Poor-Performing Team

As with the poor performer on the high-performing team, don’t leap to any immediate conclusions about who the high performer on the poor-performing team is. That one developer who’s constantly early on their stories? They could be sandbagging their estimates to make themselves look good. The developer who’s constantly talking about all the new things they’re learning? They may not actually be quite as comfortable with that new technology as they claim, or they may be learning the new stuff mostly so they can stand on the sidelines and nitpick decisions by claiming that “If only we’d adopt X, we’d be so much better off…”

Instead, your high performers are often the ones who not only display high degrees of skill in the skills relevant to the team’s current task set, but also have a high degree of “will.” What is their willingness to perform well? Be careful not to judge them just by the words they throw at you, but the actual actions to back those words up. Actions speak louder than words. If they’re always first to volunteer to take on a task (even one so pedestrian as sweeping the floors), yet always get their assigned work done as well, they’re demonstrating the will to succeed. Those with high “will” are also the ones who won’t stop at the first obstacle, but look for ways around blockers before giving up.

Having identified them, you now face an interesting dilemma—if you leave them on the team, you run the risk of them burning out, of them feeling like their activities aren’t making much of a difference to the team as a whole. Remember, nothing creates stress like holding people accountable for things they don’t control, and the high-performing individual is going to be particularly sensitive if their actions aren’t yielding the kind of success they’re pursuing.

In essence, your choices fall into two categories:

• Keep. If the high-performing individual seems to be meshing well with the team, there’s strong chance they’ll be able to pull the team up with them. Encourage this: give them both verbal and moral support, as well as more concrete/practical means of support (like carving out time and/or budget) to encourage those activities that elevate the team as a whole. If they’re leading a book club within the team to help improve others’ skills, carve out time from the schedule for them to do so. If they’re actively pairing with the others on the team to work on others’ stories, maybe even consider reducing the high performer’s load so they can continue and perhaps even accelerate those pairing activities.

  Make sure to praise the team collectively for their progress, and listen carefully for the team to reflect that praise back to the high-performing individual—when that happens, the team is really starting to develop that psychological safety you want.

  If the high performer isn’t already engaging in those sorts of team-elevating activities, they may be waiting for some kind of signal to indicate that you support the idea of them doing so. Perhaps the thought hasn’t occurred to them yet. Either way, enlisting their help in improving the team will give the high performer a greater sense of autonomy and value to their work.

• Transfer. Sometimes, though, the team is just not responding to the efforts of the high-performing individual, and it will at some point be time to consider moving the high-performing individual either to a new team, or into a role where they aren’t as affected by the activities of the poor-performing team surrounding them—give them a pilot project to work on, or assign them features that give them maximum isolation from the things the rest of the team is working on. (Doing this before moving the high performer off the team gives you a chance to observe their performance somewhat apart from the team, and validate that they are, in fact, the high performer you believe them to be.)

  When it’s time to move the high performer to a different team, work with your leadership to identify the best time and team to move them to, and ideally make it a promotion to boot. Keep in mind, too, that many companies are developing a “technical” track to run alongside the “management” track for their employees—so perhaps one suggestion is to promote the high performer to report directly to your boss, as an individual contributor who can “float” between different teams and bring their skills to bear on a variety of different problems.